I can think of one thing that's not useful

Journalism about marketing is at best an oxymoron; for some strange reason it's hard to get honest "behind the scenes" facts or real analysis out of marketers who are extremely good at telling a smooth single story that they totally control.

So if I read industry mags at all, I'm skimming to find anything I might think is relevant. And I tend not to bother with mainstream press reportage, unless I want to become all hot and bothered, because their lack of basic knowledge makes their writing by and large useless. (This isn't a trait that's limited to their analysis of marketing; Salon's Patrick Smith, a working pilot, regularly talks about just how awful press coverage is of almost any given airline story.)

But as I cruised this morning's Globe, I got sucked into an article, Simon Houpt's Adhocracy column, about the new Toronto Trending site. I thought the site itself had some interesting ideas, but maybe wasn't all it could be. But toward the end of his story, Simon Houpt talks about a new "wave" of marketing that focused on being useful to consumers, and he mentions some current examples.

Lovely. Only a few years late.

Utility is a paradigm we've been working at our shop with for three or four years, and one which we've already evolved internally a couple of times. We didn't invent the idea, either. And I really think that Simon Houpt should know that utility has been around for a while in this business that he writes about regularly.

For some quaint reason, I expect a journalist who's writing a column about marketing to know something about it beyond the press releases he gets in his inbox.

do not write like this, do not talk like this

In the stories about Cisco closing down the Flip video line, this gem was the feature quote, as it's the only one in the official Cisco press release:

"We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy," said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. "As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network's ability to deliver on those offerings."

If Jon Stewart were trying to parody Cisco, he couldn't have done a better job. Chambers sounds like an automaton and a buffoon. Worse, because the language could apply to pretty much any industry, any company, it makes him sound like a professional CEO who, in jumping from executive suite to executive suite, doesn't actually know that much about the products or company he's leading – the kind of CEO he doesn't actually seem to be.

For god's sake, PR flacks, be direct. Engage the question or the situation as best you can, even if you have to tapdance a little. (Watch and learn.) Otherwise you're assuming your audience are idiots who will fall for your misdirection, or you're not-so-subtly telling them that you don't feel like you have to answer the question.

Either way, you piss people off.

Do not write or speak like John Chambers. Ever.